Hitchens died today of esophageal cancer, receiving treatment at the M.D. Anderson clinic here in Houston- a fact I became aware of when he accepted an award for the promotion of atheism at a convention for like minded anti-clerical intellects and citizens hosted here in Houston. I suspect that the convention came here rather than expect he come to them in his exhausted and pained last months. Just this past week Vanity Fair has run another of a series of self reflections about life and its passing, something that Hitch has been doing since he canceled the book tour for his 2010 memoir last summer.
His latest volume out this past September by
Twelve Books is his fifth collection of essays and contains musings political, literary, and personal published in various outlets from the past seven or eight years since the publication of
Love, Poverty and War, a collection I picked up and read when living in NYC sometime in 2003-2005. Then he was fresh from the battles over his resignation at
The Nation over support of Bush’s intervention in Iraq. His
A Long, Short War elaborated in more detail his rationale for supporting regime change and preemptive war, but it did him no favors among the left for such ardent enthusiasm for the bullying behavior by the Bush administration and the neo-con adventurers such as Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith and others.
Because I try to follow Hitchens, and have since the late 1990s, I read the vast majority of these pieces in Slate or The Atlantic, where he offered a weekly political column and literary reviews, respectively. The material here that I have possibly overlooked appeared in British papers, Vanity Fair (where he covered American mores and politics, not unlike the Slate columns), or as prefaces to new editions of literature, usually English or “imperial” such as Rebecca West, George Orwell, or Graham Greene. His reviews take a broad approach to American and British political figures, from Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, and Paine to Samuel Johnson, the Mitfords, and Tony Blair or offer literary reassessments of Twain, Lewis, and Updike, as well as reviews of contemporary Brits of his own social circle such as Martin Amis, James Fenton, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan. Impressively, his range for skewering politicians, arguing to the finish, and upholding and championing creative, artistic values among truly incredible literary men leaves me humbled. His incredible possession of vast, encyclopedic knowledge of literature, history, and contemporary events is the evidence of a man with an illimitable capacity for synthesizing a vast amount of reading. Indeed, my own two hours minimum, or one hundred pages minimum, daily reading course is a direct attempt to keep up with this man.
I began reading Hitchens at just the right moment- it was late in the 1990s as a punk rocker, aspiring political engagé, and at the start of a course of what has now become almost fifteen years of academic training in history. I recall that I became aware of his writing first in the Lewinsky/impeachment scandal of 1998 when he was, from the left, skewering Bill Clinton for triangulating with the triumphant GOP for a third-way set of compromises that abandoned any commitment to sustaining or, more, enlarging the vast but crumbling New Deal era social safety nets. These reforms began under Reagan and, in Hitchens' Britain, Thatcher, of course, but in the 1990s as America’s economy underwent a powerful expansion the American right pushed the Democrats into an acceptance of deregulation and triumphant capitalism. Clinton, elected with a mere plurality in 1992 and obstructed by a shift in control of the House in 1994, tacked to the winds and alienated staunch leftists like Hitchens, who’s column in The Nation regularly espoused anticlerical, antifascist, and socialist diatribes crafted with a British accent from a stalwart of the 1960s student movement/New Left movement. Hitchens was on fire in the late 90s as Clinton embarrassed and disappointed liberals, and yet I do not believe I began reading The Nation until the early stages of the 2000 election and the Nader campaign, perhaps late in 1999. What I do recall, and my notes inform me I did not read until 2002, is the 1999 publication of No One Left to Lie To, a no holds barred attack on Clinton and moderation within the New Democrats, and by extension Britain’s New Labour.
Although I may not have read that volume until 2002, at least according to my note in my elegant, blue British Verso edition, I do believe I once, earlier, owned a pink paperback, likely from the US press, and perhaps read it as early as 2000, and it is very likely 2002 was my second or even third time through that volume. Maybe Salima and I excluded it upon the merging of our libraries, but nonetheless, whether I read the Clinton volume in 2000 or 2002 is immaterial, because in 2000 Hitchens, largely known to me from his
Nation column was beating the drum for an international trial of Henry Kissinger on various war crimes or human rights violations with regard to his role in the assassination of Allende in Chile and the invasions of Laos and Cambodia, all during his tenure of service to Richard Nixon. A short documentary agitated these points, Hitchens toured in support of it, but I did miss both, the tour and appearances as well as the 2001 book. It was brief, I understood the arguments and was in “the choir” so to speak, and after I quit working at the bookstore in 2002 I had little time or money for the volume. Nevertheless I followed the columns in
The Nation until 2003 when the war began and I was living in NYC.
In 2003 Hitchens and other columnists of The Nation whom I had admired for several years such as Eric Alterman, Katha Pollitt, Alexander Cockburn, and others debated the run up and sales pitch to the Iraq invasion. Although an outspoken atheist and socialist, Hitchens- after several visits to Iraq and Kurdistan- argued vociferously that anti-fascism, humanitarian intervention, and opposition to Islamic fundamentalism demanded a leftist-motivated intervention in Iraq. Of course humanitiarian internationalism and intervention were normative responses on the political left before Bush disparaged "nation building" in his 2000 debate with Gore, and worse, made nation building impossible to support after the invasion of Iraq. The calls for action by Clinton and others during the Rwanda civil war or the actual interventions in Yugoslavia in the 1990s were precedents for Hitchens' support of an international coalition to remove Hussein, and Hitchens alienated so many by siding with Bush even when the rest of the world would not. He of course was attacked as a turn coat, as a stooge for the GOP, as monstrous in support of imperial violence by the USA in a leftist movement dominated by antiwar pacifism and anti-American cosmopolitanism. Not wilting before an argument, Hitchens stubbornly, logically, and consistently found himself debating the antiwar movement, criticizing any tolerance of inhumane regimes on the grounds of pacifism or anti-imperialism. He became increasingly alienated from the left for his commitment to aggressive anti-fascism and from the right by his anti-capitalism and atheism. Not surprisingly, the political powers such as Wolfowitz and Bush put him to work, making more of a fool and tool of him than he wished to admit or may even have ever recognized, willing to overlook his radical politics and atheism in favor of highlighting him as part of a broad spectrum political consensus behind the invasion and/or as an example of a left wing culture warrior coming in from the dark. Or maybe he was working them.
Either way, Hitchens looked remarkably foolish as he continued to defend his principles in the face of growing recognition that even if the war’s necessity could be defended (and debatable at that) but that the actual waging of the war and “winning the peace” were grossly, incompetently handled by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and others. And now Hitchens began to triangulate himself, making clear that support for the invasion on anti-totalitarian principles and distress at its implementation by the Bush "wrecking crew" were both plausible beliefs within his own rationale, and that critics who dared tell Hitchens “I told you so” were worse, because not only were they wrong on principles, they were using suffering in Iraq to score points in yet another leftist schism so familiar to Hitchens from his days in the British leftist student movement. Nonetheless, Hitchens expanded his columns into A Long, Short War, published in 2003, but not read by me until much later in 2006, because like the Kissinger book, I already felt like I knew what was between these covers; I was right. For anyone who reads the periodicals, his collections can often be full of late, no longer topical, bullying essays on politics, but the writings on history, secular faith, culture and literature are wonderful to have between covers. Hitchens reminds us that the slogan of the international left in the 1930s, whether in Spain, Italy or the Third Reich, was Fascism Means War, and like Orwell and Hemingway, meaningful resistance to evil required the occasional resort to arms. Only to sad that the war against Saddam began on premises entirely different than those that I hope Hitchens and other like minded travelers of the Internationalé would never have shared.
In 2005, however, distracted by work and frustrated with the Bush administration, I did pick up his fourth collection from 2004, a wider ranging volume that included literary essays. Unknown to me, I found that he was breathlessly erudite and opinionated about yet another subject that I cared deeply about. I devoured the volume and began looking for more while he continued to oblige with a series of short books. In the spring of 2007 I read his contribution to Basic Books’ The Art of Mentoring series, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) and his third collection Unacknowledged Legislation (2000). In summer 2009 I read Why Orwell Matters (2002), and in summer 2010, Thomas Jefferson (2005) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (2006). At some point in the second Bush administration Hitchens began writing about atheism, publishing a manifesto and a collection of edited essays on the topic, that again, like so much of his work, impressed me in the boldness and catapulted him to increased celebrity, but did not appeal to me as a reader, already confirmed in nonbelief. I expect to read the books at some point, but there is no pressing, topical need that compels me other than respect and appreciation of his prose. For some, this willingness to go on the vicious attack against fundamentalism in the American political scene, particularly against the Vatican and protestant evangelical political operatives was a return to form for his supporters like me on the left, but for the right it was indefensible and ungrateful after the shelter extended to him during his alienation from The Nation. True to form Hitchens shrugged and remained an independent intellect in the entire manner I intend without sarcasm, disparagement, etc, I truly admire this man not just for his reading and productivity but for his stiff spine and self reliance. Truly inspiring.
That same spring Hitchens released his memoir, Hitch-22, and although I did not read it until October 2011, I anticipated his July visit to Brazos Bookstore in Houston, finally a chance to meet the author. Unfortunately, his cancer diagnosis and treatment kept him from keeping the tour, and I neglected to read the volume until much later. After the September publication of this, perhaps his final collection, I realized that I might profit by reading the memoir and then this volume together. I was reminded again of why I admire the man, even if the contents were almost entirely familiar. Luckily for me there are earlier books (Elgin Marbles, Missionary Position, For the Sake of Argument, among others) and undoubtedly Slate and Vanity Fair will host his past columns, not to mention the volumes of posthumous essays that will undoubtedly appear. I only wish I could have summoned the courage to visit him in the hospital here in Houston before he was gone.
RIP.
